Thank you Cubs for blowing up my feed with joy

I can’t remember the last time I opened Facebook or Twitter and didn’t cringe. Didn’t want to immediately look away. Didn’t want to do that thing where you know you shouldn’t be reading something but you click on it anyway and then feel that much more awful about yourself, your day, the general state of the world, humankind and whatever awful it is we are conspiring to do to one another, the places we live and ourselves.

…Didn’t just have to say, “OK, enough.” And, “Things aren’t really this bad. Are they?”

Are they?

Thursday was different.

I woke up and there was a sea of blue and red on my feed. Smiling faces and flushed cheeks and eyes pooling with tears of joy. The trolls scooted under the bridge and hid. The sexual predator in the Ronald McDonald wig with the clumps missing, also gone—back to former reality TV star purgatory or whatever swamp he crawled out of. The email rumors, vanished. Scary clowns in the bushes, nope. The pulsing Earth overheated like a microwaved office lunch, nowhere to be found. Nary a mass shooting, an amber alert or a mug shot of some meth’d out dude coming soon to my neighborhood. No warnings about the food I just ate. No sickening tale of a woman who froze to death in her car during winter’s first cold snap. No piles of hoarder puppies euthanized at the local shelter because I didn’t get off my ass and adopt. No solitary child sitting on a pile of rubble, hungry and damaged beyond recognition, orphaned by war.

Where did it all go?

I don’t know.

And for the moment, I don’t care.

I mean, I get it. It is just a game. A silly one at that. A strangely drawn field and overpaid bearded men running and spitting and cursing and swinging all to hit a leather ball over a wall with a shiny wooden stick.

Who cares?

Well, I for one do.

I care because it gave us a break, a breather. People gathered together and cheered together and wept together and embraced together and high-fived together and kissed together.

I’m sure in that crowd outside Wrigley last night, the whole teeming, cheering, pensive then exploding throng, there were Democrats and Republicans and Independents and non-affiliates. There were Christians and Muslims and Jews and Agnostics. There were rich and poor and the trying-to-hold-on-to-the-disappearing-middle. There were PhDs and high school dropouts, hourly employees and corner office honchos. Whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians along with visitors from other planets, like Bill Murray. And I’m sure if they were gathered in a focus group they’d have all types of things to say about the direction of this country and the precarious state of their own personal lives.

But last night, for one moment—one more than a century in the making—they set their differences aside, tucked their concerns in their back pockets and rooted for one thing. Just one thing.

And then this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKC5c9cmryg

And this.

Cubs fan keeps promise to late father and drives 600 Miles to watch Game 7 at his grave: ‘We had a pact’: https://t.co/CS0cubX2tp